Section: Research Program

Programming languages: design, formalization, implementation

Like all languages, programming languages are the media by which thoughts (software designs) are communicated (development), acted upon (program execution), and reasoned upon (validation). The choice of adequate programming languages has a tremendous impact on software quality. By “adequate”, we mean in particular the following four aspects of programming languages:

• Safety. The programming language must not expose error-prone low-level operations (explicit memory deallocation, unchecked array access, etc) to programmers. Further, it should provide constructs for describing data structures, inserting assertions, and expressing invariants within programs. The consistency of these declarations and assertions should be verified through compile-time verification (e.g. static type-checking) and run-time checks.

• Expressiveness. A programming language should manipulate as directly as possible the concepts and entities of the application domain. In particular, complex, manual encodings of domain notions into programmatic notations should be avoided as much as possible. A typical example of a language feature that increases expressiveness is pattern matching for examination of structured data (as in symbolic programming) and of semi-structured data (as in XML processing). Carried to the extreme, the search for expressiveness leads to domain-specific languages, customized for a specific application area.

• Modularity and compositionality. The complexity of large software systems makes it impossible to design and develop them as one, monolithic program. Software decomposition (into semi-independent components) and software composition (of existing or independently-developed components) are therefore crucial. Again, this modular approach can be applied to any programming language, given sufficient fortitude by the programmers, but is much facilitated by adequate linguistic support. In particular, reflecting notions of modularity and software components in the programming language enables compile-time checking of correctness conditions such as type correctness at component boundaries.

• Formal semantics. A programming language should fully and formally specify the behaviours of programs using mathematical semantics, as opposed to informal, natural-language specifications. Such a formal semantics is required in order to apply formal methods (program proof, model checking) to programs.

Our research work in language design and implementation centers on the statically-typed functional programming paradigm, which scores high on safety, expressiveness and formal semantics, complemented with full imperative features and objects for additional expressiveness, and modules and classes for compositionality. The OCaml language and system embodies many of our earlier results in this area [49]. Through collaborations, we also gained experience with several domain-specific languages based on a functional core, including distributed programming (JoCaml), XML processing (XDuce, CDuce), reactive functional programming, and hardware modeling.